The question of how bilinguals process ideas and build frames to understand the world is both fascinating and increasingly pertinent in our multi-lingual society. Benjamin Lee Whorf, a linguistic anthropologist working in the 1930s, first examined the relationship between language and thought and suggested that language is so powerful it can determine thought. His research into Native American languages subsequently weakened his initial hypothesis into the idea that language influence/shapes thought: an idea that we are now fairly comfortable with.But that ‘determinist’ hypothesis – that there is a direct causal link between language and thought – continues to inspire linguists to design studies to test it. Here is one such test and its results are, at the least, interesting:
The language we speak may influence not only our thoughts, but our implicit preferences as well. That’s the finding of a study by Harvard psychologists, who found that bilingual individuals’ opinions of different ethnic groups were affected by the language in which they took a test probing their biases and predilections.
Essentially these researchers found that when tested in one language respondents would have one set of attitudes and when tested in another, they would have other attitudes. This, as they report, is
like asking your friend if he likes ice cream in English, and then turning around and asking him again in French and getting a different answer.
You can read about the research at news.harvard.edu.
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